When U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Kaesee Bourne got the call from her supervisor with the news that she was to be laid off, the writing had been on the wall for months.
The longtime Las Vegas resident was six months into what she considered her dream job, one that had come with a lengthy, seven-month hiring process. On Valentine’s Day, it was unusual to hear from her boss on her personal phone — on a day off, no less.
Later, Bourne saw an email from the Office of Personnel Management that confirmed what her supervisor had told her. It cited, in part, a lack of skills that her position required and said she would be fired.
“It was just utter chaos,” Bourne recalled in a Tuesday interview.
Bourne, 25, worked with transportation agencies in California and Nevada to ensure that they were in compliance with federal laws protecting endangered species in the Mojave Desert.
Her job was a casualty of what some have called the “Valentine’s Day Massacre,” the mass firing of federal employees across several agencies who were considered probationary, or had not yet completed a year of work before which they could be fired at will. The Trump administration has said the effort is a part of a national campaign to reduce government spending.
Three employees from different agencies based in Southern Nevada, including Bourne, spoke with the Las Vegas Review-Journal in recent days about their experiences being fired.
How many employees were fired?
The agencies that manage the nation’s lands and water have been hit particularly hard by the layoffs.
Great Basin National Park in Baker lost 20 percent of its staff, or five rangers.
A group of National Park Service employees has been anonymously crowdsourcing information about which parks have lost staff. As of Tuesday, the group had reported 13 layoffs at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, six at Death Valley National Park and 11 at Utah’s Zion National Park. Each spokesperson representing these areas deferred to the park service’s national headquarters to confirm the number of firings, but the national office had not responded as of Tuesday.
A spokesperson for the Interior Department, the umbrella agency that manages the park service and others, told the Review-Journal on Tuesday that it would not comment on personnel matters but that it was working closely with the Office of Personnel Management to ensure they “are prioritizing fiscal responsibility for the American people.”
“Interior will continue enhancing visitor experience as we embrace new opportunities for optimization and innovation in workforce management,” the spokesperson said. “We are focused on ensuring that every visitor has the chance to explore and connect with the incredible, iconic spaces of our national parks and refuges.”
Bourne’s suspicions had been heightened for a while, she said, especially as the Trump administration asked agencies to hand over lists of probationary employees and she was offered a chance to resign.
“I had a few mentors saying that they had been there for six different administration changes, and they had never seen anything like this before,” she said. “One day you’d be fine, the next day you’d feel like nothing was real and that your job was not secure. It was very frustrating.”
White House: ‘A mandate from
the American people’
Since Valentine’s Day, some have taken to social media to praise the firings of federal employees.
In a statement on Tuesday, a White House spokesperson told the Review-Journal that the layoffs are part of President Donald Trump’s goal to make the government more efficient.
Since Trump took office and issued an executive order, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency — with ties to Tesla CEO Elon Musk — has taken aim at what some see as excessive federal spending.
“President Trump returned to Washington with a mandate from the American people to (bring) unprecedented change in our federal government to uproot waste, fraud and abuse,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields wrote. “This isn’t easy to do in a broken system entrenched in bureaucracy and bloat, but it’s a task long overdue.”
Polling from Colorado College released this month showed that Nevada’s voters generally support federal agencies under the Interior Department and that 70 percent of them are against reducing their pools of funding. The poll equally surveyed Republicans, Democrats and voters who don’t identify with either party.
In a brief Instagram video, Rep. Susie Lee, D-Nev., vowed to fight for the 13 employees who were laid off at Lake Mead National Recreation Area.
One of the area’s affected employees was Riley Rackliffe, an aquatic biologist.
The Henderson resident was one of the only federal scientists tasked with monitoring the water quality of Lake Mead, the country’s biggest reservoir upon which Southern Nevada relies for 90 percent of its drinking water. His work was the subject of a 2024 Review-Journal story about algal blooms in Lake Mohave.
Rackliffe said he had received two awards for his work, as well as a positive employee evaluation. The only explanation he was given was in the form of an email — similar to the one sent to Bourne.
“The Department determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department’s current needs, and it is necessary and appropriate to terminate, during the probationary period, your appointment,” the email stated.
Rackliffe wasn’t convinced by the justification.
“They fired me because they could,” he said.
Tradeoffs with firing decisions
Neal Desai, a spokesman for the National Park Conservation Association, said the park service is the wrong place for the Trump administration to find federal spending abuse.
He pointed to the agency’s economic reviews showing that 4.6 million park visitors spent an estimated $239 million in Nevada while visiting National Park Service lands in 2023.
The organization says national parks represent one-fifteenth of 1 percent of the federal budget, meaning that the average American household pays as much for national parks each year as it would to buy a cup of coffee.
Some specific concerns exist for staffing in a park like Death Valley, he said, where extreme summer temperatures can and have led to multiple heat-related deaths.
“For all this talk about making government run more like a business — you would never run a business this indiscriminately by just firing people without understanding how it works and the consequences,” Desai said.
Uncertainty for the future
Federal employees have mixed feelings about one day returning to their jobs if the opportunity presented itself.
Rackliffe said becoming a park ranger fulfilled a lifelong dream. The 36-year-old father of two young children said he dressed up as a park ranger for Halloween when he was 10.
“I still believe in the park service,” Rackliffe said. “The park service didn’t discard me. It was higher up than that.”
Henderson resident Jenna McLeod, 33, lost her post at the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boulder City office — a place where she worked as an trainee since 2021. In September, she filled an open, full-time position as a program support assistant. She described it as an administrative position where she served as “the glue of the office.”
After graduating from Boulder City High School in 2008, she went on to the College of Southern Nevada with a specific goal of working for the Bureau of Reclamation.
Even though she’s disappointed, McLeod said she would reapply in a heartbeat.
The most pressing priority for now, however, is seeking continued health insurance coverage and unemployment benefits, McLeod said.
“Right now, it’s just one day at a time,” she said. “There are moments I feel like I’m going to be sick. But this is my reality, and I can’t change it. I have talked to others, and they’re all scared.”
One bright spot for Bourne, the Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, is that speaking out against firings has increased sales for her children’s book: “Discoveries in the Sand,” meant to be an introduction to the wildlife of the Mojave Desert. She was a guest on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” over the weekend.
Most of her colleagues are hesitant to speak out about the firings, Bourne said, largely because of the Hatch Act, a 1939 law that prevents federal employees from expressing partisan opinions.
Bourne isn’t ruling out an eventual return to a federal agency, but she said it isn’t high on her list of future opportunities. Still, federal agencies matter deeply, she said.
“Think about everything in your life that you need the federal government for, and realize that those things are going to be affected,” Bourne said. “If you don’t care about anyone else, think about how it’s going to affect you.”
Contact Alan Halaly at ahalaly@reviewjournal.com and Ron Eland at reland@bouldercityreview.com.
